Table of Contents
This book is dedicated to ending
food obsession and body hatred.
In loving memory of:
Jack Marcus
Evelyn Grand
Ida and Jack Wachter
Adele and Julius Steinhauer
and Neil
Acknowledgments
Marsea and Andrea would like to thank:
Santa Cruz O.A., without which this book would not be possible.
Dr. Bob and Bill W. for pioneering the path to recovery and Rozanne for making it available to compulsive eaters.
Geneen Roth, Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann for pioneering the non-diet approach.
Stephanie Brown, an inspirational author and theorist who developed the stages of recovery for alcoholics. We used her stages as a model for people with food, weight and body issues.
All of the courageous clients in our groups for testing out these Journeys with their lives.
Laura Golden Bellotti and Deborah Abbott for their wonderful editing and cheer-leading.
Anya Abrams and Joel Primack for generously giving us our first computer.
Carol Inez Charney for her creative ads and graphic design for InnerSolutions.
Jennifer Chase for the many projects and errands she did for us, and advance thanks for many more to come!
Nancy Bazor for helping us get organized.
Eric Schoeck for his diligent and thorough help proofreading the manuscript.
Joan Barnes-Strauss for finding us and believing in us.
Jewish Family and Childrens Services of San Francisco for giving us another forum for our ideas.
Process Therapy Institute for their brilliant techniques and instruction.
Leigh Cohn and Lindsey Hall Cohn of Grze Books for their impeccable timing in finding us and for taking this book on its next Journey.
Marsea would like to thank:
All the people who loved and supported me when I could not love or support myself: Mom, Dad, Chris Parks, Miriam Goldberg, Morgen Alwell-Bartel, Juli Vinik, Erica Golden, Ellie Freedman, Gail Faris, Barbara Marcus, Lynette Marcus, Diana Grand, Sam Grand, the women of My Kin Talk, Bill Marcus, Stephen Grand and Andrea.
And the man who found me when I could: Jamie F. Amos.
Also, my honorary homies: Ken Bewick and Cynthia Strauss for being wonderful people.
Andrea would like to thank:
An incredible group of friends and mentors who daily show me the way on my Journey.
My mom for her gift of empathy, my dad for his sense of humor and my whole family for their endless generosity, love and encouragement.
Marsea for many things, not the least of which is typing the entire book on her computer and never once complaining when I delivered chapters and ideas on little yellow Post-its!
Neil Brown, Stefanie Elkin and Robyn Wesley for, in their own unique ways, teaching me how to be a therapist.
Pam Gruen for her brilliant marketing skills and for always believing in me.
Introduction
As licensed counselors, with many years of experience leading groups and helping individual clients with food, weight, and body issues, weve long had an interest in creating a book to help others. At least as important as our professional credentials is the fact that weve both been there with food, weight, and body issues of our own.
Having spent most of our lives in the grips of dieting, overeating, sneaking food, being fat and miserable, being thin and miserable (and being every weight in between), we each embarked on a Journey of Recovery. We use the word Journey here because we have found that recovery is a process, a Journey. It is not a single event, a destination, or a number on the scale. It is a way to live. The process involves changes, challenges, and insights. Much like traveling to any unknown location, it can be scary. The only reason that we were both willing to go on this Journey was that we had each come to a point in our lives where we knew we were at a dead end; our food compulsions, self-hatred and body obsessions had us trapped in a prison that had become intolerable.
We discovered that the first necessity on our respective Journeys was to break our isolation. We each had thought we were the only ones who struggled so intensely with food and weight issues. There were no maps or directions on boxes of cookies or bags of chips to tell us where to go for help. And there was no one to guide us after our latest diet ended or failed. Fortunately, we were each led, separately, to a support group where we learned to be honest about our feelings, our eating and our lives. When we began to admit our problems to, and share our pain with, people in the group, we learned that we were not the only ones who suffered in this way. We discovered there were other people who had found or created maps with directions to guide them, and later us, on the Journey of Recovery.
Next we learned that hating ourselves hindered rather than helped us in this process. We had always thought that if we could just get to the perfect weight, we would like ourselves and be happy. We now know that no weight is ever perfect enough to do the enormous job of creating happiness. We found that we had to first accomplish the difficult tasks of liking ourselves and treating ourselves well before we could ever live comfortably in our bodies.
The next leg of our Journey has been a long one (in fact, were still on it!). Instead of focusing on where we are going and whether or not we will ever arrive (and how many calories, or lost pounds it will take to get there), we now focus on the trip itself. We notice who is traveling with us, and we are aware of and curious about the surrounding scenery. We found that focusing on food and weight kept us from seeing and being in the moment, and from knowing what we really needed. We had to teach ourselves to pay attention while driving, to travel at our own pace, to stop when necessary, honk the horn when in danger, and to get regular tune-ups along the way. In other words, we had to learn how to be present, how to take care of ourselves in the moment, and how to cope with problems that arise. Yes, it got rocky at times, and sometimes we even got lost or broken down; but we, and hundreds of our clients, found this Journey incomparably more rewarding than that old trip from the couch to the refrigerator, to the scale and back again.
We think its important that you know a little bit about who we are and how our separate Journeys began.
Andrea:I spent most of my life hating my body, obsessed with food, and starting and failing countless diets. As a teen, I dieted with friends and family members, and snuck food after meals. However, as the years progressed, and the pain that fed my eating continued to go unchecked, so too did my insane relationship with food and my body.
By the time I started college, I had gained and lost the same 30 lbs. so many times that (as Lily Tomlin once said) my cellulite had dj vu. I did not know the source of my pain because all my attention was focused on my weight and the food I ate. I became bulimic (although I had not even heard of the term then). What began as an innocent experiment in weight control turned into an eight-year addiction to bingeing and purging. At one point, I realized I was out of control and could not stop. What now strikes me so deeply about that period is that I had so many friends and family members around me, and yet nobody knew of my silent agony.
